


The Sleeping Son

by BannedBloodOranges



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Drabble Fic, Failing Love, Gen, Horror, Loss of Sanity, Not Canon Compliant - Dead Men Tell No Tales, The Curse of The Flying Dutchman Is a Curse for a reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 15:58:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15777342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BannedBloodOranges
Summary: They had been the parts of myths, the mythmakers.





	The Sleeping Son

**Author's Note:**

> Non-profit fun only.

The first decade passes. For him, it is dank waterlogged cabins, moving past living ships like ghosts, charting courses to where death and dying find most. For her, he does not know. She lives on in him, a dream and memory, golden hair and golden skin on dying light on yellow sand.

The first time they reunite, she is standing proudly with their son at her side. A gift he left her from the time of the golden sands. She still carries the power of Pirate King on her brow. His son is kind and confused by him and treats him as a warm stranger. For a day, they are family. That night, they are husband and wife and make love.

Time is pitiless and so is his duty. The sun sets too soon and takes him with it. She does not cry, but her lips are tremulous in the last daylight, and their boy will be a man when the next sunset shoots emerald into the sky.

 

* * *

 

It is so dark down in the water. He had only ever seen the skin of the tide flittering diamond bright as a boy. Never had he known the murk of it, the chilling crush, the shapes of sea creature mulling about above him, skin tingling shadow plays.

His father is here. William. Bootstrap.

“It’s a heavy price.” He says. It is all he says. He looks at Will, at his Captain, and repeats it again. “It’s a heavy price, make no mistake.”

His father’s knife had made the incision.

“Heavy price.” He limps away. Somewhere, there is the cry of the dead. Will feels the churning in his bones, the noose of his duty tightening his fingers on the helm. “Heavy, heavy price.”

  __

* * *

 

Elizabeth is forty when his ship reaches the shore, and his boots find the pulpy sand beneath, and already he is haunted and tired and she, she fretful with shades of her old repression, Henry gone and in love, and her, keeping watch from her lighthouse.

They grab at each other at first sight, his arms bound about her body, and she feels thin to him, the twist and wire of seafaring muscle faded to widow dust. They go to bed as the hours roll on by, and never has time been so keen, so fraught, so cruel.

The chest is kept locked in the cabinet, the thud of it a mere echo in his empty chest. He has locked her away as well, poured concrete on her feet, trapped a selkie on the shore.

“Please don’t go,” she says, quiet. “I love you. Please.”

He looks toward her and sees the lines under her eyes.

The curse was made for a mortal with an immortal love.

He sees the irony.

 

* * *

 

He plays her words in his head.

_I love you._

He counts it, counts the times she said it. One, after their first kiss, a whisper between their lips. Her lips, pink as seashells, her teeth glinting as she said it. Two, before their first failed wedding. They had been training in swordplay and he’d knocked her on her back, and how she had laughed, tossing her sweat-streaked curls from her face. _I love you so much, Will._

Three. Their wedding day, their wedding night. All that they had said to each other, as time ran from them like a thief.

Time.

He touches his calendar, thumbs the ink rubbed thin.

3650 days.

A barnacle is attached to his palm, suckering down like a slug.

 

* * *

 

The third time, Elizabeth is fifty, grey speckled hair. She has been at sea. The lighthouse is empty, dusty, void of Henry’s old playthings and her fine lady dresses. Henry has not come back. He does not understand a mythological father. Little does he know how Will and Elizabeth had been the parts of myths, the mythmakers.

Her face is badly scarred. When he arrives, they share a chaste kiss, and she makes him dinner as if he is a husband back from the docks. He can tell she is angry. Why or why not, he does not ask, and wonders that they have been away from each other for so long, could he even guess. But his world is black deathly sea, hers a hot purgatory, fishhook in her skin every ten years, not able to take a lover, not able to run away. A wild gull with clipped wings, sailing low always in the shallows of the tide.

They have nothing to say to each other.

 

* * *

 

A secret part of him, blinking awake in wild and dusky depths, wonders if Jack stabbed the heart not to save Will, but to lock Elizabeth away, to halt whatever it was they exchanged in those weeks he crewed the ship he would soon captain.

He loves Elizabeth Swann. He loves her so much, the brittle and changing ways about her, her courage and cleverness, he loves her so much he could die of it, although the only way to death is in her hands. But Elizabeth Turner, he is not so sure about.

Who has his heart? Swann or Turner?

“Marriage changes things,” His father mumbles. He is forever at the helm, leant almost into it. Will looks at him dully until all the colours blur. Green, blue, black, brown. All the colours he knows. No gold. Not anymore. “People change. I should know, son. Heavy price, heavy price…”

 

* * *

 

 

 The fourth time he comes back, she has only ever been at sea. Her hair is cropped short above her ears, wiry and white. She looks at him as if he is a bad dream, even if her arms open and her lips part, cracked and creased from rolling years and rolling sea. Her kiss tastes like salt water. It is all he knows, now. Barnacles creep across his skin like pustules. His boyish beauty is aged to a dim, expressionless face, wet and white and bloated like a drowning man.

She is old, and he is ugly, and he will only get weirder of face and she will only become more bent and crackled like the burning away of wood until all they have is the ashes of each other.

If she dies, what becomes of him? What becomes of Will Turner? Does his burden lift, his immortality forfeit? Does he find another love? If so, what will love him, the absent Henry? Would he wait on shores with wives and children amongst his heels?

“What becomes of me?” He cries into nothing. The sea once promised far-off places, but all he now has is the sea, big and black and about him, tasting of his old wife’s kisses. “What becomes of me, now?”

 

* * *

 

Five years later, his son dies at sea. Will rushes to him, greedy to pluck him from his mortal life, to turn his son into his service.

Henry is shivering and wet and full of fear. Will despairs at the fear but also relishes at the nakedness of it, the assuredness that Henry is his, now, his to keep and charge.

“Do you fear death?” He chokes out, marvelling at how Henry, of golden skin and hair, how he is Elizabeth Swann and nothing else.

“No.”

It is the answer of Elizabeth Turner.

At that moment, William Turner becomes a monster.

 

* * *

 

Elizabeth Turner dies in her bed at sixty-nine, the echoes of roaring men in her ears, glory in her scars and callouses and the ripped remains of her monumental beauty. She did not forgive him for taking Henry. He will never know if it was enough to kill the last shaky shred of this thing he once called love, if her old feet would have stood on the sand and beckoned him home one last time.

Henry sleeps in the bark of the ship. Henry, a beacon of their shared flesh, evidence that they had consummated marriage beneath a drowning sky that pinked blood on the horizon. If Henry is here, then she is here, then he is here, then they all are here. Here, on their ship, the grand and endless adventure.

He knows not of where his heart went, where it still beats, even as his chest pangs empty. He reaches out his slippery hand, red and wet like an opened lung, and feels the trembling beats of Henry’s heart in the weeping boards of his Dutchman.

Ah! As of now, it no longer matters.

His father is the helm. His eyes stick out like mounds of black onyx amongst the algae.

“A heavy price,” He repeats. “Heavy price, heavy price, heavy price…”


End file.
